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mental ray 3.10 adds Ptex support, ‘major’ iray update

mental ray 3.10 will include native support for the Disney-developed Ptex texture mapping system (pictured above), at least in the standalone edition, according to documentation posted on the Autodesk support website.

Autodesk has posted the features list for mental ray 3.10 on its support website.

Raytracing performance for hair has been improved, with the documentation quoting a speed boost of 10-30% when calculating detail shadow maps.

Other new features include the option to generate stereoscopic OpenEXR (.sxr) files and “initial” support for the Alembic data-interchange format supported natively in Maya and Houdini.

Changes to iray
The iray GPU-accelerated preview renderer has also been updated. The Autodesk documentation describes iray 2.0, which adds native core support for BSDF layering among a number of other performance-enhancing features, as a “major update”.

iray 2.0 was previously implemented in Service Pack 2 for 3ds Max 2012, although user reports were mixed, as indicated by this thread on the Nvidia Advanced Rendering forum, and this one on the AREA.

There’s no indication as to which of the features of mental ray 3.10 will be exposed in which of the individual 2013 releases of Autodesk’s software: the developer previously announced that mental ray will be made a ‘true’ plugin for Maya, which should presumably increase the number of features exposed there, but this thread on the Nvidia site suggests that Ptex will not be supported through a GUI in 3ds Max 2013.